For the first time in 15 years, there are no self-made billionaires under the age of 30.
(This story is part of Forbes’ 2024 World’s Billionaires package, to be released on Tuesday.)
It’s a rare feat to become a billionaire, especially at a young age. The average billionaire is 66, and the oldest person in the ranks is 102. Still, a select few have gotten super-rich super young.
This year, the 25 youngest people on the Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list are all 33 or younger. Together they are worth $110 billion. A few are self-made, having built notable companies like Snap (Evan Spiegel, 33), Gymshark (Ben Francis, 31) and Oculus VR (Palmer Luckey, 31).
Most had a lot of help. For the first time since 2009, every billionaire under 30 inherited his or her fortune—the result of some self-made entrepreneurs aging into their 30s, and a sign that the “great wealth transfer” has begun.
The youngest billionaire in the world is Brazil’s Livia Voigt. Just 19 years old and still in college, she’s worth an estimated $1.1 billion thanks to her minority stake in the electrical equipment producer WEG, which her late grandfather cofounded. She and her older sister, Dora Voigt de Assis, 26, are two of seven fresh faces among the 25 youngest billionaires, and two of 18 heirs among this set.
The wealthiest of the heirs are Ireland’s Mistry brothers, ages 25 and 27, who are worth an estimated $4.9 billion apiece thanks to the Mumbai-based conglomerate Tata Sons, which spans IT and communications, engineering and energy. They received their minority stakes in Tata after the 2022 death of their father, Cyrus Mistry, who died less than three months after their revered grandfather Pallonji Mistry.
They’re far from the only young billionaires to have joined the list in the past three years due to a father’s passing. Italy’s Clemente Del Vecchio, 19, received a hefty stake in the Italian-French maker of Ray-Ban, EssilorLuxottica, after the 2022 death of Leonardo Del Vecchio. His brothers Leonardo Maria, 28, and Luca, 22, also inherited fortunes, as did three older siblings. Then there’s Sophie Luise Fielmann, 29, German heiress to Fielmann AG, an eyeglasses fortune left by her father, Günther Fielmann, who died in January at age 84.
These inheritances illustrate the beginning of a long-anticipated generational wealth transfer among aging populations around the world. In the United States, Baby Boomers and their elders (those born in 1964 or earlier) hold $95.9 trillion of a total $147.1 trillion of household wealth, per the Federal Reserve. Trillions are expected to change hands every year as the affluent elderly pass away and leave their fortunes to descendants. Aging billionaires like Charles Koch, 88, and Phil Knight, 86, are currently preparing to pass their inheritances on to their children.
Another reason so many super-young billionaires are heirs: Many of the archetypal self-made young moguls, such as Snap’s Bobby Murphy (35) and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (39, United States), have grown up. They aren’t being replaced. This year, there’s just one self-made newcomer among the 25 youngest: Japan’s Shunsaku Sagami, 33, a merger and acquisitions dealmaker whose company M&A Research Institute Holdings uses AI to match clients. Its stock has spiked over 800% since it went public in June 2022, sending him soaring into the billionaire ranks. And making fortunes young is no guarantee that entrepreneurs can hold onto them. Ryan Breslow was the youngest self-made billionaire last year at 28. If he hadn’t blown it, he still would be.
Nearly all of these 25 who made the ranks are richer than last year. The biggest year-over-year gain belongs to Red Bull heir Mark Mateschitz, whose fortune is up by $4.9 billion, followed by Michal Strnad, who inherited and now runs the defense producer Czechoslovak Group and is worth $2.4 billion more than last year. Most of the youngest billionaires—15, or 60%—are from Europe. The rest are from Brazil, South Korea and Hong Kong (all heirs), or Japan and the United States (all self-made).
Here are the 25 youngest members of the World’s Billionaires list, all of whom are 33 and under, ranked from oldest to youngest.
Evan Spiegel*
Age: 33 | Citizenship: U.S. | Source of Wealth: Snapchat | Net Worth: $3.1 Billion
Spiegel dropped out of Stanford to start Snapchat with his fraternity brothers Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown in 2011 and became a billionaire by the age of 25. Now he and Murphy, 35, together own about a quarter of publicly traded Snap Inc., which generated $4.6 billion in revenue last year. He serves as CEO. In 2022, he paid off the student loan debt for the entire graduating class of the Otis College of Art and Design, where he’d taken classes during high school.
John Collison*
Age: 33 | Citizenship: Ireland | Source of Wealth: Stripe | Net Worth: $7.2 Billion
Born to scientist parents near Limerick, he and his brother Patrick, age 35, sold their first startup—the eBay management software Auctomatic, which they formed with brothers Harj and Kulveer Taggar—for $5 million in 2007, when John was in secondary school. It was just the beginning for the duo: After John enrolled and then dropped out of Harvard (Patrick went to neighboring MIT), they founded Stripe, a payment software whose investors have included Fidelity and Ireland’s sovereign development fund. In 2016, a funding round that valued the unicorn at $9.2 billion made him the world’s then-youngest self-made billionaire at 26. An employee tender offer in February valued the company at $65 billion.
Shunsaku Sagami*
Age: 33 | Citizenship: Japan | Source of Wealth: M&A Brokerage | Net Worth: $1.9 Billion
Moved by the experience of his grandfather, who was forced to close his real estate business because he didn’t have a successor, Sagami, who got his start in advertising, launched M&A Research Institute Holdings in 2018. The company uses AI to advise small- and medium-scale enterprises with aging owners who have no one lined up to take over. He became a billionaire last April, when M&A Research Institute Holdings’ share price skyrocketed thanks to spiking revenues and a surge of M&A activity in Japan.
Jonathan Kwok
Age: 32 | Citizenship: Hong Kong | Source of Wealth: Real Estate | Net Worth: $2.4 Billion
He and his brother Geoffrey, 38, owe their fortunes to the family’s Hong Kong real estate empire. After their father Walter Kwok’s death in 2018 at age 68, they inherited his stakes in Sun Hung Kai Properties—the territory’s largest property developer—and Empire Group Holdings, the developer Walter started after family feuding kicked him out of the SHKP chairmanship. Jonathan now runs Empire Group Holdings with his brother and is the youngest billionaire in Hong Kong.
Mark Mateschitz
Age: 31 | Citizenship: Austria | Source of Wealth: Red Bull | Net Worth: $39.6 Billion
He inherited 49% of Red Bull when his father Dietrich Mateschitz, who founded the business in 1984, died in 2022. Prior to his father’s death, he’d run the company’s organics division, but resigned because “I do not believe one should be both an employee and a shareholder of the same company,” according to a statement at the time. Red Bull generated $11.6 billion in revenue last year and sold 12.1 billion cans, enough for each person on earth to pep up with 1.5 energy drinks.
Ben Francis*
Age: 31 | Citizenship: United Kingdom | Source of Wealth: Gymshark | Net Worth: $1.3 Billion
When he was a 19-year-old college student with a Pizza Hut delivery job, he and his friend Lewis Morgan started a website they called Gymshark, which they used to sell supplements they’d bought in bulk for a small profit. When they transitioned into sewing and screen printing fitness clothing in Francis’ parents’ garage, their sportswear brand was born. Morgan offloaded his stake to private equity firm General Atlantic in a 2020 deal that valued the company at $1.5 billion. Francis still owns 70% of Gymshark and serves as CEO.
Andy Fang*
Age: 31 | Citizenship: U.S. | Source of Wealth: DoorDash | Net Worth: $1.2 Billion
He and his Stanford freshman dormmate Stanley Tang teamed up with MBA student Tony Xu (now 39) to launch DoorDash after noticing that the only food delivery options in the area were a local Chinese joint and Domino’s. They founded the company in 2013, while still at Stanford, and took it public in 2020. Fang currently runs DoorDash’s “LaunchPad” engineering team.
Michal Strnad
Age: 31 | Citizenship: Czech Republic | Source of Wealth: Weapons | Net Worth: $4.4 Billion
His father was a small town scrapyard owner who started out renovating ex-Soviet equipment at the end of the Cold War. He transformed the business into the $3.2 billion (2023 revenue) defense producer Czechoslovak Group, which Strnad has since taken over as owner and CEO. In his spare time, Strnad collects art, sports cars and historic vehicles.
Palmer Luckey*
Age: 31 | Citizenship: U.S. | Source of Wealth: Virtual Reality, Defense Technology | Net Worth: $2.3 Billion
The self-taught software engineer made his first fortune when he launched the startup Oculus VR, selling a virtual reality headset he’d made at age 16, then cashed out to Facebook in 2014 in a $2 billion deal. In 2017, he founded the defense technology company Anduril, which has been sending drones to Ukraine. A December 2022 funding round valued Anduril at $8.5 billion.
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Stanley Tang*
Age: 31 | Citizenship: U.S. | Source of Wealth: DoorDash | Net Worth: $1.2 Billion
He and his DoorDash cofounder Andy Fang rejoin the billionaire ranks this year after a tough 2022, when the company’s big net losses sent its stock price tanking. DoorDash began 2023 with sizable layoffs, then managed to increase its revenue 31%, to $8.6 billion, and shrink its net loss by 59%, to $558 million, from 2022. It was enough to boost shareholders’ confidence: DoorDash stock is up 127% year over year. Tang heads the company’s robotics and automation arm, DoorDash Labs.
Gustav Magnar Witzøe
Age: 30 | Citizenship: Norway | Source of Wealth: Fish farming | Net Worth: $4.2 Billion
He was only 19 when his father gifted him nearly half of the fish farming behemoth SalMar. Eleven years later, his dad continues to operate the company while Gustav focuses on real estate and tech startup investments. SalMar’s share price has soared 800% over the past decade, inflating the younger Witzøe’s wealth along with it. He’s now Norway’s fifth-richest person and its biggest taxpayer, having given the government NOK 292.4 million—the equivalent of about $29.6 million—in 2022. Exporting to over 50 countries, SalMar is the world’s second largest salmon farmer. The company says it produces enough to feed every Norwegian a nightly fish dinner.
Sophie Luise Fielmann
Age: 29 | Citizenship: Germany | Source of Wealth: Optometry | Net Worth: $2.7 Billion
When Günther Fielmann, the entrepreneur known for bringing cheap eyeglasses to Germany, died in January at the age of 84, he left much of his fortune to his two children, Sophie and Marc. While Marc, age 34, has helmed Fielmann AG since 2019, Sophie has no role in the eyeglasses company but still owns about a third of its stock.
Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio
Age: 28 | Citizenship: Italy | Source of Wealth: Eyeglasses | Net Worth: $4.7 Billion
He is the chief strategy officer of EssilorLuxottica, the largest eyeglasses company in the world and the owner of Ray-Ban, which his father chaired until his death in June 2022. Del Vecchio, his mother and his six half-siblings all inherited a 12.5% stake in the family’s Luxembourg-based holding company Delfin, which owns nearly a third of EssilorLuxottica.
Katharina Andresen
Age: 28 | Citizenship: Norway | Source of Wealth: Investments | Net Worth: $1.7 Billion
Her great-great-great grandfather purchased the tobacco producer Tiedemanns Tobaksfabrik in 1849 and built it into a family cigarette empire that lasted until Andresen’s father sold it in 2005. Now the family focuses on its investment firm Ferd, which deals primarily in real estate and private Nordic companies, including the oil service business Interwell and Norway’s largest private medical laboratory. Andresen and her sister each own 42% stakes in Ferd. After gaining experience as a board observer for several years, she became a member of the board in June.
Alexandra Andresen
Age: 27 | Citizenship: Norway | Source of Wealth: Investments | Net Worth: $1.6 Billion
Like her sister Katharina, she holds a 42% stake in the investment company Ferd and currently sits on its board. But her biggest passions are equestrian. She owns the Oslo horse-breeding stable Andresen Dressage and herself rode horses competitively (she is a three-time junior Norwegian champion in dressage riding) until spinal stenosis-related back problems forced her to exit the ring.
Firoz Mistry
Age: 27 | Citizenship: Ireland | Source of Wealth: Diversified | Net Worth: $4.9 Billion
He and his brother Zahan are the richest of the 30-and-unders, thanks primarily to their 4.6% stakes in Tata Sons, the $150 billion (revenue) Indian conglomerate that owns 29 public companies, including Tata Consultancy and Tata Motors. Tata is considering its own IPO in the coming months. He and Zahan inherited their stakes during a 2022 marked by family tragedy, when their 54-year-old father died in a car accident less than three months after their grandfather, one-time chairman of Tata and its largest individual shareholder, died at the age of 93. Their uncle Shapoor Mistry holds the rest of the family’s 18.4% stake.
Dora Voigt de Assis
Age: 26 | Citizenship: Brazil | Source of Wealth: Industrial Machinery | Net Worth: $1.1 Billion
She and her sister Livia are the youngest granddaughters of Werner Ricardo Voigt, the billionaire cofounder of the Brazilian electrical equipment producer WEG, who died in 2016. They each own 3.1% of WEG, slightly less than the 3.9% stakes owned by their older cousins Eduardo and Mariana. WEG exports to over 135 countries and is one of the world’s biggest electric motor manufacturers. Neither Dora nor Livia has a role in its operations.
Zahan Mistry
Age: 25 | Citizenship: Ireland | Source of Wealth: Diversified | Net Worth: $4.9 Billion
Like his brother Firoz, his wealth comes from a 4.6% stake in the Tata conglomerate as well as a 25% stake in construction giant Shapoorji Pallonji Group. He and Firoz have been taking on leadership roles in the debt-laden SP Group and helping to reorganize it in the wake of their father’s death. Though he and his brothers are Irish citizens, they live in Mumbai, where both the SP Group and Tata are based.
Remi Dassault
Age: 22 | Citizenship: France | Source of Wealth: Inherited | Net Worth: $2.5 Billion
He inherited his wealth when his father died in a 2021 helicopter accident at age 69. The bulk of his fortune comes from an estimated 2.5% stake in the French software company Dassault Systèmes and an estimated 4.1% stake in Dassault Aviation. His great-grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, laid the foundations for the family fortune when he invented an airplane propeller the French used in the First World War.
Luca Del Vecchio
Age: 22 | Citizenship: Italy | Source of Wealth: Eyeglasses | Net Worth: $4.7 Billion
He is another Del Vecchio sibling whose fortune stems from his 12.5% ownership of Delfin, the holding company that has stakes in the eyeglasses giant EssilorLuxottica, as well as the insurer Generali, the banks Mediobanca and UniCredit and the real estate developer Covivio, all based in France or Italy. Unlike his half-brother Leonardo, he has no role in EssilorLuxottica.
Kim Jung-min
Age: 22 | Citizenship: South Korea | Source of Wealth: Online gaming | Net Worth: $1.4 Billion
She and her sister Jung-youn each own approximately 9% of the South Korean-Japanese online gaming publisher Nexon, founded by their late father Kim Jung-ju in 1994. They inherited their stakes upon his death at age 54 in 2022. Nexon’s hit role-playing video game MapleStory, released in 2003, helped popularize the free-to-play model whereby users paid only for cosmetic, nonessential accessories for their characters. Neither she nor her sister has a role in the company.
Kevin David Lehmann
Age: 21 | Citizenship: Germany | Source of Wealth: Drugstores | Net Worth: $3.3 Billion
Even for this list, his windfall came young: His father gave him his 50% stake in Germany’s leading drugstore brand, dm-drogerie markt, when he was just 14. Neither he nor his father are operationally involved in dm, and they intentionally keep a low profile. The drugstore chain has over 4,000 stores across Europe and recorded revenue of about $17 billion for the 2023 fiscal year.
Kim Jung-youn
Age: 20 | Citizenship: South Korea | Source of Wealth: Online gaming | Net Worth: $1.4 Billion
She and her sister hold 9% stakes in game developer Nexon, mostly through the holding company NXC as well as another called Wise Kids. Those assets, plus millions in dividends, make up the bulk of their fortunes. They paid a hefty inheritance tax after their father’s 2022 death in the form of NXC shares that gave the government a 29.3% stake in the company. The sisters now own 36.7%.
Clemente Del Vecchio
Age: 19 | Citizenship: Italy | Source of Wealth: Eyeglasses | Net Worth: $4.7 Billion
He is the third Del Vecchio sibling and the fourth heir to an eyeglasses fortune among the 33-and-under set. Like his brothers, he owns 12.5% of the holding company Delfin, which has stakes in a range of companies that include the Ray-Ban producer EssilorLuxottica. The three brothers currently reside in Milan.
Livia Voigt
Age: 19 | Citizenship: Brazil | Source of Wealth: Industrial Machinery | Net Worth: $1.1 Billion
Nineteen until July, and two months younger than Clemente Del Vecchio, she is the world’s youngest billionaire. Like her sister Dora, she owns 3.1% of WEG and has pulled in millions from dividends. She is currently enrolled in university and is completing coursework in psychology.
This article was first published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
